by Honor Harlow
On account of Mammy always talking to Mr Delaney, she didn’t see me when I came in from school, so lots of days I went out to play with Úna, who was always minding her baby sister and little brother in the pram.
The day after Úna gave me the marble, I told her about my brother in the shoebox, in the ground near the big, fat rock near the sawmills.
“The fat stone is the Mass Rock.”
“How do you know it’s called that?”
“Everyone knows it and my nanna told me people go to the spot near the Mass Rock, to bury the babies that had no names.”
I was happy they were other babies with my brother because now I knew he wasn’t on his own and wasn’t lonely.
“Let’s go there after school with the pram.”
“It’s far, far out the road, Úna.”
“What harm and I want to see the sawmills, where my big brother gets the bag of saw-wood for the back of the fire.”
“You’ll get tired pushing the pram.”
“Sure, amn’t I always walking with the pram and besides, I’ll get Kait Kenny to come and she’ll push it half the way.”
“I want to push the pram too.”
“Only if Kait lets you.” Kait Kenny was Úna’s best friend but sometimes she played with me in the yard too.
On the way to the Mass Rock, two cars drove by on the Sligo Road. We were safe on the path and Úna’s brother, Sheamie, got giddy and leaned out of the pram and pointed his little arm after them saying ‘ar’. When we turned down the boreen, Úna told me and Kait to pick some yellow pissy-beds and daisies from the edge of the road.
“Look, Úna, it was around this spot that Daddy put my brother.”
“Alright, we’ll put the flowers there.” And then Úna said to my brother and the other babies, “When Arlene, Kait and me are in Heaven, we’ll go down to Limbo to see ye all and take ye for a walk in the pram.”
Úna started humming ‘Tá Goaithe an geim scathta fuar’ and Kait joined in. It was the song Úna sang to put her baby brother and sister to sleep. When they heard us singing it, they thought Úna wanted them to go to sleep and started getting cranky because they didn’t want to go sleep. Úna let Sheamie, the big baby, out of the pram so he could toddle around while she showed us how to play ‘King of the Castle’. She jumped up onto the Mass Rock and started shouting, “I’m the King of the castle and no one can knock me down.” Kait pushed her off and stepped up on the rock and shouted the same thing until I pushed her off.
Úna was the best wee lass in all Ireland, England and broad Scotland, even if Mammy didn’t tell me to be palsy-walsy with her.
On the way back home, Kait and Úna said the dump was better than the sawmills, but I didn’t know cos I never went to the dump.
The Nannas on Clonthu Hill
When it was nearly time to eat plenty of eggs for breakfast and to wear something new, I told Daddy I wasn’t small anymore and I wanted to walk home with my pals Úna and Kait. He asked me where they lived. I told him they lived in Dun na Rí Road.
“Arlene, that is on the other side of town, near the cemetery.”
“I know Daddy, but they go from the railway station to their houses on the tracks because it is a shortcut.”
“Arlene, a train could come…”
“Daddy, I won’t be going on the tracks cos I don’t know where they live.”
“Ach...”
I didn’t want him say no and told him real quick how Kait’s grandmother lived on Clonthu Hill, only a small bit from the pitch that was near our road.
“Daddy, Kait Kenny goes up Clonthu Hill every day after school because she has her tea in her Nan’s house.”
“Does she?”
“She does and besides Úna’s Nan lives near Kait’s.”
He smiled down at me and tossed the hair on the top of my head with his big hand and said, “My wee lass is getting big.”
A good few days after the sawmills, my pals said I could go with them to see their nannas on Clonthu Hill. I was so happy that I started skipping and Kait did too, but Úna said it was more fun to play Tick. “You’re ‘It’,” Kait shouted at her and started running, so I did too. Úna followed us as we ran past the railway station and then we galloped along the path in St Jarlath’s Avenue. Úna caught Kait and then she was ‘It’ while me and Úna ran so she couldn’t catch us.
It was great fun, and I didn’t notice the houses with the gardens and the footpath were gone, until my foot hit against a stone. We were out in the country on a sandy and stony lane with cows in the fields at the sides. Úna told me the countryside was called Nuns Field and the lane was Clonthu Hill, where the nannas lived.
Úna’s and Kait’s nannas’ houses were up at the top of the hill on the side of the lane. They were low and white and a bit shiny like Mammy’s lips when she put lipstick on.
“Why are yer nanna’s houses shiny?” I asked them.
Kait looked at me and said, “Why do you want to know?”
“Cos that’s why.” I answered but Úna was good and told me why the outside of the houses had a gloss like Mammy’s lips. It was because after the wintertime, Marteen, Nanny Ward’s son, and Mick the Sticks white-washed the walls with thick stuff from a bucket.
The roofs were yellow-coloured moustaches and they had small, fat, black doors.
“There’s no top on the door,” I said as Kait caught me and said I was ‘It’.
“You silly goose, it’s a half door split in the middle, so it is. Look, you lift up this latch to open the bottom part and then you put it down again to shut it. Nan likes the top part wide open except when it’s lashing out of the heavens.”
“Why is the door of the other house all opened?” I asked.
“For the chickens to go in and out.”
I looked and saw hens around the door, their heads bobbing up and down as they pecked the ground. A woman with a wide skirt was standing in the doorway holding the bottom part of her apron in one hand and with the other one she was throwing potato skins to the hens and chickens. She did it like the priest did sprinkling holy water on Maura McLoughlin’s father’s coffin, saying ‘Chuck, chuck, chuck’ instead of prayers.
“That’s Nan Gormley, Úna’s nanna, so she is, and after dinnertime, Nan always gives the waste to the fowl.”
“But she’s saying, ‘Bad ceis to ye or that’ and the dog is barking, frightening the hens.”
“That’s Prince, her dog, and he’s only barking to keep the hens from getting in front of Nan’s feet, so he is.”
“Why is that?”
“You want to know everything, so you do, Daddy Long Legs,” Kait said looking up at my face. She was bigger than me because she was six like Úna and I was only five, but she had to look up at me because I was taller than her and Úna. I didn’t call her Squirt or Shorty because I wanted us to be palsy-walsy, like Úna was with her.
“I don’t, only about nannas because I have no nanna like you and Úna.”
“Everyone has a nanna.”
“Mine are in heaven with Holy God.”
“The two of them?” I nodded my head.
“We’ll let you come with us every day, if you want.” She had a different look on her face then. I smiled at her to keep her palsy.
I liked going up to the two houses with the moustache roofs. And having Prince jump and play with us. The hens and chickens were our pals too. They were always around, going in and out through the bottom part of Nan Gormley’s door. She left it open so the chickens could use the kitchen as a shortcut to go out to the backyard. It was funny to see them hopping in through the front door and landing on the floor inside on their skinny legs. When Nan was sweeping the clay floor that was flattened into the ground and the chickens got in the way, she’d hold the brush with her two hands and swish it low, scattering them. The hens would squawk a ‘bawck, bawck’ deep from their necks. Some would run hopping on one leg while others flapped their wings and tried to fly away from the straw strands.
> I took the twig that day because I wanted to swipe it like Nan did to scatter the hens. The handle was long, and I couldn’t move it as quick as she did. Prince danced in front of the twig, so I put my leg over the handle and said I was a witch.
“No flying close to the light bulb now, thinking it’s the moon, a girl, or you’ll break it on me.” There was a bulb hanging from the ceiling in Nan Gormley’s house. They put the light in for her to listen to the radio she got for free because she was blind. Úna said she was the only house in Clonthu Hill with a radio, so people came to the house for the news in the evening and for the football on Sundays. They crowded into the kitchen when the weather was bad but stayed outside when it was mild and not raining.
The kitchen was nearly the whole house, except for a bit off to the side, where there was a room with a bed and a feather tick. We never went in there to lie on the bed, but we sat on the hobs when the nannas let us. The hobs were like seats at each side of the fireplace and there was a chair in front of it.
The windows were across from the fireplace on the front wall where the door was. They were small, square boxes with wide sills. Nanny had geraniums in pots outside of her windows, but Nan didn’t. Inside the house, the two nannas used the sills as shelves to put things on. Nan Gormley kept her clay pipe on the windowsill near the door and had a tea canister on the other one. The statues of Our Lady and St Martin de Porras minded Nanny Ward’s Woodbine cigarettes and her pension book. She kept the paraffin lamp on the other one. She used the paraffin lamp with wicks when it got dark because there was no bulb hanging from the ceiling in in Nanny Ward’s house like there was in Nan Gormley’s.
There was a black pump, ten times fatter than a bicycle one, stuck in the middle of a grey step on the clumpy, dried grassy patch beside the ruins of a house from the famine times. The pump had a handle at the back of its head. To get the water flowing out from the snout in the front, you had to move the handle up and down. The nannas came out with a bucket or a tin jug when they wanted water.
On the other side of the rocky road, up a small bit from the gate of Nuns Field, there were patches of weeds and bushes and clumps of tough grass that cut your fingers if you pull it. Sometimes the rocky part of the road was full of the Tinkers’ wooden caravans, their long handles sliding towards the ground. The horses were loose, roaming nearby and chomping the grassy tufts. We’d see the men making camps, hammering thick, round pegs of wood into the ground. Right next to the fat stump they placed the end of a long thin rod. Then they tied the two together, by wrapping twine around them to hold them tight. Bringing the thin rod up to nearly their heads they made a round arch like the church door and then brought it down to the other side of the ground, where they tied the end to another peg. They got another bendy stick and did the same. They made the two rods meet in the middle like a humped cross. They covered it with stiff, black material. If it had pretty drawings like the caravans, instead of being black, it would be like the Queen’s skirt in Alice in Wonderland. It was in front of the black tent that the Tinkers lit the fire and boiled the kettle with the water from the nannas’ pump.
When the tinkers came to get the water, the nannas would stand at the door talking to them. Mick the Sweep was their favourite one for talking to, because he cleaned chimneys for people in Drumbron and had the news. He had to bend nearly double to get through the door of Nanny’s cottage. She said he was a mountain of a man, but I told her he still needed a ladder for cleaning the chimney in our house.
“Indeedin he does, I see him put that wooden ladder in when he loads up the pony and cart.”
“Do you see the long poles with brushes twisted around the tops?”
“Nothing gets past you, a cailín óg,” she said wanting me to go out and play. I also knew cleaning chimneys made Mick the Sweep’s fingernails have a dark stripe at the bottom. The black powder hid inside his wrinkles too, making them look like dark cracks around his eyes and his clothes gleamed like they were rubbed and brushed with shoe polish because his cap and the shoulders of his jacket were shiny with soot.
Going up to Clonthu Hill was smashing, better than going to Mass and nearly as good as going to the market with Mammy on the day there was no school. Kait’s grandmother, Nanny Ward, and Úna’s grandmother, Nan Gormley, were my pretend grandmothers. My own two real ones were in heaven with Holy God.
Nan and Nanny were big like the mammies but different too. Nan had hair the colour of the ashes in the fireplace and it was back from her face. Nanny’s was white like a sheep’s wool. They didn’t wear coats, instead they had woollen blankets with fringes they draped over their shoulders and arms. When it rained, they wrapped the shawls around their heads, throwing the pointed peak over their shoulders. Their long, black skirts were puffed out by a pile of petticoats that swayed when they walked like the boats I saw in Sligo.
They had their habits for when they were dead, under the bed, wrapped in brown shop-paper and tied with a string. Sometimes they’d pull out the parcel, open it up and show us the brown dresses they were going to be laid out in. Nanny’s was a chocolaty brown with a light colour square like a scapular on the chest. She was very pleased with her dress and would say, “Won’t I be the fine-looking corpse with this on me?”
Nan Gormley had coins in a cloth pouch, with a string like shoe lacers, around her neck. It fell between her diddies. If it was pouring out of the heavens and we couldn’t go out to play, she would let us see the money. She took the bageen off her neck and emptied out the coins into the palm of one hand and then turned her hand over the table and they would fall on to it. Our job was to make piles with the different size coins. We placed all the half crowns, shillings, pennies, half-pences and farthings into different round-towers on the table.
“Nan, what’s the money for?”
“The wake! I’ll have no one saying my wake was a mean affair.”
“Is the money for the people who come?”
“God bless your innocence, a girleen. It’s to buy the whiskey and stout, pipes and bacca.”
“Will there be no sweets or biscuits for us?” Kait asked.
“A mhuirnín, there be any amount of sweet cake and brown bread and butter, as well as the other stuff.”
“Last year Mammy let me stay up late at her uncle’s wake and they sang, and Jock Connor played the accordion,” Kait told us.
“Musha, there’ll be no lack of music at my wake either. Sure, if I knew the priest would bury me, I’d have the keeners in too.”
“Will the priest not let the keeners in Nan?” Úna asked her nanna.
“Indeedin he won’t, sure isn’t the bishop dead set against them all together. In the old days, before the Big Hunger, every wake had the keeners around the coffin giving the dead person a right send-off, but that was fadó, fadó.”
As the rain lashed against the windows, we were cosy listening to the nannas telling us stories about long ago and about the fairies in Nuns Field.
Fairy Rings
One day Úna, Kait and me were going into Nuns Field to pick blackberries and gooseberries for Nanny to make jam.
“A cailín dubh, go nowhere near the fairy ring.”
“What’s a fairy ring?”
“It’s soon you’ll see one when you go into that field. Climb up the gate and I’ll show you.”
“Alright.”
“Look at the circle of stones.”
“I am looking.”
“Keep well away from them. On your life, don’t step over the stones and go inside.”
“Why not? I won’t fall cos I’m big.”
“The Good People live inside.”
“The Good People?” I said surprised anyone would live in a field with no house. “Who are they, Nanny?”
“The sibhe, the fairies.”
“The fairies! I promise I won’t go traipsing around the Good People’s place,” I said as I kissed my fingers and brought it down to my chest.
“Mhaith an cailín, respect their sacre
d places.”
“What would happen if I did, Nanny?”
“They’ll take your soul.”
“What would they want my soul for?”
“They want you hollow inside, so you don’t remember.”
“Remember what, Nanny?”
“Their world.”
“I don’t care about their world, Nanny. I want to stay with my own mammy and daddy in our house.”
“Ah a girleen, when you see their world and hear their singing, you’d forget everything and want to stay with them.”
“I want to only be in my own house. But the fairies are mean if they don’t let people stay in their world.”
“It’s their world and they only let the ones they want to stay.”
“Who do they let stay?”
“A handsome lad or a beautiful girl when one of the sidhe falls in love with them.”
“Why do you call them the Good People if they let no one go into the fairy rings and they steal souls.”
“In the old language they are daoine sibhe. They don’t steal souls.”
“You said they did.”
“Arlene, a grá, they don’t steal your soul, you leave it behind you.”
“Why would anyone forget their soul?”
“The sidhe world is so beautiful, you don’t want to leave it, so even if your body comes back, your soul stays.”
I shouted after Úna and Kait that I’d catch up to them because I wanted to ask Nanny something.
“How do you know if someone is away with the fairies, Nanny?”
“Ah, a girleen, by that empty look in their eyes.”
“Why? Is there nothing inside them?”
